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The Java™ Tutorials
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Synchronization
Trail: Essential Java Classes
Lesson: Concurrency

Synchronization

Threads communicate primarily by sharing access to fields and the objects reference fields refer to. This form of communication is extremely efficient, but makes two kinds of errors possible: thread interference and memory consistency errors. The tool needed to prevent these errors is synchronization.

However, synchronization can introduce thread contention, which occurs when two or more threads try to access the same resource simultaneously and cause the Java runtime to execute one or more threads more slowly, or even suspend their execution. Starvation and livelock are forms of thread contention. See the section Liveness for more information.

This section covers the following topics:


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